Opening Wikipedia to More Languages

Technology can be a great tool to help people share information. Today, we’re seeing that with the release of the beta version of WikiBhasha, a multilingual content-creation tool designed for Wikipedia users.

With WikiBhasha, Wikipedia’s global community of users can find content on Wikipedia, translate the content into other languages, and then either compose new articles or enhance existing articles in multilingual Wikipedias.

The WikiBhasha beta is available as an open-source MediaWiki extension and as a user gadget in Wikipedia. It also can be obtained as an installable bookmarklet at www.wikibhasha.org, which is hosted on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform.

The name WikiBhasha derives from the well-known term “Wiki,” denoting collaboration, and “Bhasha,” which means “language” in Hindi or Sanskrit. It’s the perfect name for this cross-lingual tool.

WikiBhasha supports more than 30 languages. The beta version of WikiBhasha focuses on leveraging Wikipedia’s huge store of English-language articles. But WikiBhasha’s design makes it possible to source and translate other languages into users’ local tongues.

WikiBhasha has an intuitive interface that makes it easy to source articles for conversion to local languages. A simple three-step process guides the user in content discovery and sourcing from English Wikipedia articles, composing local-language Wikipedia articles, and, publication in the target Wikipedia.